They stand at some distance from the building, at least one hundred yards away, and during the lecture on self-editing a manuscript, I watched these trees. They were huge. Their branches were many. And all of these branches–those fine, pliable, long willow branches moving in the wind–were yellow: the beginnings of leaves.

My mother says that willows are the first to get their leaves in the spring and, in the fall, are the last ones to lose them.

***

Heading home from Michigan on Saturday, we drove through West Virginia and saw that spring had come to the woods.

The trees themselves were still empty. The mountains all around us were like heads with crew-cuts, I said: their trees stood straight and bare as sticks, as bare as close-cropped hair. Between them we could see the forest floor exposed, like so much scalp.

But spring is a todder: it starts knee-high. The green creeps along the forest floor, appearing first in shrubs and bushes.

At home, we had that stage weeks ago, and then the trees sprouted the pinks and incandescences of seed and flower. Over the four days we were gone, I expected this would change. Once it starts, it seems to me– and no matter how many times winter comes banging back into the room– the green of spring is unstoppable: It will come. It is coming. It’s here.

***

I don’t like change, and I see this fact as flaw. It’s an evolutionary disaster, really: failure to adapt.

But it isn’t that I don’t adapt. It’s that, when I see the need coming, I simply don’t want to.

***

At home now, from the breakfast room window, I watch again the way the young maple leaves open like so many hands. The beech trees that line the trail, that retreat into the woods, hold their furled parchment leaves close all winter–and then suddenly they shed them. Beech trees stand naked for a breath, for a day, and then they are bursting with green.

Walking the dog, I stop to pull a new-greened branch toward me and gently touch one leaf. It is thin and pale or deeply green. And it is fabric-soft, like wet paper, like infant skin, like a fine layer of tissue torn from the roof of your mouth.

***

I have watched many springs make their entrance. I am never tired of it. When the seeds and flowers and green start to come, it’s like I can’t tear my eyes away. I’m distracted by the green everywhere along the side of the road, compelled by the growing green outside my bedroom window.

When my daughter-in-law and I departed for our four-day trip, I regretted that I would miss some of the approach of green.

***

There is the change that blind-sides and devastates, the change that means grief. No one wants that kind of change–and while we have known that type before, this is not what I’m talking about.

I’m talking about the kind of change that means growth and life and that still and nonetheless, I so often do not want. We have had much of that kind of change around here lately with yet more to come, and all of it has been very good.

***

I wonder if I watch the oncoming green because I’m hoping for something new in it, something I’ve never noticed before. On Monday I discovered that the newborn leaves of the pin-oak are pink and even a pale magenta– only on their edges, and only when they are very, very new.

But I like what is familiar in it, too, of course. The maple leaves, as I said, opening like hands, and then the wind comes along and moves them, and I stand there watching them longer than is reasonable because it is just so beautiful.

The post Opening Like Hands appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

I think they lived there for a little more than a decade. By the time I was six, they had sold it. They had their apartment in the city and the house where my parents live now, the one we return to every summer, the one “Out East,” we say, at the almost very end of Long Island.

But some of my earliest memories are from the Stony Brook House, and although the image in the email was merely a floor plan, just a map drawn up in pencil, I recognized each room immediately.

I was alone in my house when I saw it, but I think I gasped aloud. I looked down at a two-dimension drawing on the flat screen of my cell phone, but what I saw somehow was the full house, upright, entire. Room for room, closet, bathroom, window. The yard, the front porch, the smell of the boxwood out front, and the way the sunlight came into the rooms.

***

Lisa grew up just outside of D.C. Her house was a split level with columns across the front on a lot marked with grand old trees. She moved there with her family when she was two and called that house home through her college years. Now in her early forties, she and her siblings last year completed a difficult if not-uncommon task: they helped their aging parents sort through a lifetime of things, gather up what they needed, and move closer to family.

The house quickly sold to some people from Boston. They bought it without seeing it first-hand, via website and an obliging realtor. It fetched an excellent price.

Recently, Lisa told me she’d had news of her childhood home: it’s gone. They razed it. Not just the house, but the entire property: the trees and all the grass. So it wasn’t the house the buyers were after, apparently. It was the lot.

That is, of course, their prerogative.

But just yesterday, Lisa mentioned it to me again in passing. Just a quick comment that opened a view onto loss. “I’ve known the house is gone for a month now,” she said. And she has a full life here in North Carolina: a lovely home of her own, a thriving marriage, three beautiful children. But the empty lot reported by her sister is nonetheless on her mind. “I’ve known the house is gone for a month now,” she said. “I’m still sad.”

***

My sister and her husband have a large old house in the country in western Massachusetts. It’s set back from the road; you have to know where to look, when passing, to see one ivory peak under the roof and a window next to the chimney.

It was built in 1922 and is quietly grand: warm wood floors; glass doorknobs; built-in bookcases and a broad staircase, with landing, that descends into a generous center hall.

It has a second staircase that goes to what might have been servants’ quarters, but if the house ever enjoyed that kind of exalted service, it’s long lost to memory. My sister and her husband bought the house nearly ten years ago from a widow who had lived there alone for a long time.

But one afternoon, not long after they moved in, my sister found herself with smiling and unexpected guests in the driveway. It was a woman with her grown daughter, and the woman explained that she had grown up in that house, perhaps forty years before.

Together they walked through the rooms, the woman recalling to her daughter and my sister how her family had lived in those spaces. This had been her brother’s room; here they had done their homework. Her mother had the sewing machine in this room, and they would talk together while they did their school work and she sewed. And on Christmas mornings, she and her siblings stood like this on the staircase, waiting for their parents to call them into the living room, with the fireplace blazing to warm the room, to the Christmas tree and the presents.

***

The news this morning is of fires continuing to rage in California. With no rain in sight and a persistent dry heat, the fires have progressed, at times, to consume the length of three football fields in a minute.

The path of these fires is indiscriminate. Houses, streets, wineries, strip-malls– they eat through everything, and their wake is charred shells of places, barely recognizable rubbish. One can identify remains because of where they are, not what.

The damage from a hurricane is different: belongings disappear completely or are found the length of a football field away. In its rage, a hurricane trashes things, hurls them, twists rain gutter and rebar alike.

We have had too much of this kind of thing lately. And the news is of the loss of life and property, of businesses undone. Of the incalculable costs and where to turn for recompense or justice. Of fear and failed infrastructure and climate change, of when and where this will happen again.

***

Of course in all instances like these, the loss of life is the most terrible of the losses.

But in my privileged and safe distance (this time) from disaster, I find myself caught on the loss of homes. Be it trailer, apartment, or warm wood floors and columns out front, a home is a shelter from the elements. The place to come in from the wind and rain, a filter for light and weather.

At its best, a home is also a filter for everything outside. It’s a space where one can be still and can be oneself unmolested, where one can comfortably consider what it means to be alive in the world even while enjoying a little distance from it.

I know that not everyone has a home, and that not every home is safe.

But a home should always be someplace safe. And it should never be snatched indiscriminately from the landscape.

***

Waiting at the traffic light, Emma and I saw them emerge from the house: the boy, maybe seven; his sister, five. Both with their heads down, their sandy brown hair drifting at their ears, the napes of their necks. He descended first, and she followed with their mother, and each of the children wore backpacks.

The steps to their house are concrete and slathered in leaves. Their window blind was closed crookedly, and a bluebird house sat askew on the tree next to their front walk.

They live in one of those charming old neighborhoods that has recently been rediscovered in Durham, and as we drove away I wondered if those children knew that. I thought of their backpacks and their mother, of the school-day awaiting them both. Of the bluebird house and the window-blind and maybe the lunches inside their backpacks.

I am glad to think that the up-and-coming-ness of their neighborhood– for now, anyway– probably makes no difference to them at all.

***

We have an empty bedroom in our house. Will won’t be coming back to it, as he got married in July. And Everett is gone for six months, on the travel portion of his gap year.

The boys shared that room for fourteen years, and it looks pretty much the way it did when they slept there every night, except that, for now anyway, there are no clothes lying–clean or dirty–on the floor.

Many times as I walk past that room, I think how glad I am of where they are now, that they have left us and are on their own doing brave, interesting, meaningful things.

But more often, I think of a single afternoon –which may have happened just as I recall it, or it may be an amalgam of many:

It is late spring or early fall. Their sister is upstairs sleeping. They are eight and six, or seven and five, and the Legos are spilled around them on the floor. The sun is shining through the windows and they are playing in it.

All they know is the Legos and perhaps Star Wars and, in a peripheral and obvious way, each other. They don’t know the sunlight, they don’t know the carpet or the bunk-beds, the desk or the dresser, because these things are just as they should be.

And their mother is nearby somewhere. Upstairs, probably. It doesn’t matter. They don’t know that she is standing there, just for a quick minute, to watch her sons playing in the sunlight on the floor.

The post Home appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

It has always been the field at the bottom of our neighborhood, the backyard of the community pool. Earliest memory finds us there with baby William at his first Easter, eight months old and unable to walk and sitting in the sand that is the volleyball court. We were late for the egg hunt, but really, he wouldn’t have been able to hunt for eggs yet anyway.

Soon enough it was the field where he first played soccer, and Everett and Emma after him. Once, on the sidelines of a friend’s game, little Everett accidentally scratched Will’s eye, and we ended up spending a good portion of the afternoon in the emergency room.

And once, distracted by the action of six-year-old William’s game, Bill and I both were surprised to find the game stopped by the cry, “There’s a baby on the field!” and one of us (both?) went hurrying out to retrieve our toddling daughter.

At age four, little William came crying toward us. He didn’t like the game. He didn’t want to play anymore. I stood with infant, stroller and toddler and wondered what to do, but Bill made an early show of fatherly wisdom that we still talk about today:

“You don’t have to play,” he told our teary boy, “but first I want you to go back out on the field and kick the ball one more time. Just once more.”

William re-entered the game and kicked the ball once, twice, lots of times. And he played soccer forever after.

Our days of sitting sideline on that field are long over now. Each of the children graduated to different sports or different fields or both, and now that field serves only as backdrop to the pool. Occasionally I see parents like we once were toting bags and chairs down the hill, their children racing ahead of them. We ourselves haven’t been down on that field in I don’t know how long. We have no reason to go.

But it’s funny how I know that field and how it’s divided up for games. There is where I sat with my in-laws, there where baby Emma played in the grass during practice. There where Will sustained the eye injury, and where his father encouraged him back onto the field.

***

We pulled into the driveway this afternoon to see our kids all leaving the house. They were dressed for playing. “We’re going down to the field to play soccer with Nathan and Katherine. You come too!” they said.

It was 82 degrees and the sky had only scattered clouds. We changed our clothes, we grabbed some blankets. I brought the novel I’m currently reading.

And of course we took the dog.

***

The days around here are full and normal. All five of us aren’t always home for dinner; people come and go based on class, meetings, work, friends. But I am consistently aware of two realities:

1. we are on borrowed time and
2. this isn’t going to last.

By the end of the coming summer, Will will be married and Everett off on his gap year or in college.

Everything will be different so soon. Which is fine and good and the normal, healthy course of things.

But what I’ve decided in these weeks and months of “last times” is to *not* pressure the family to make something of it–to plan trips and getaways and special events. Instead, I’ve just decided to let it come and enjoy it.

It’s been working out nicely.

***

This afternoon, in glorious 80-degree, sun-soaked winter light, I tossed a Frisbee with my dog and family. I watched my kids play soccer and walk handstands across the field. I lay on a blanket next to my husband and listened for the umpteenth time to his recent playlist, which includes all kinds of things I would never hear if it weren’t for him, plus the occasional number from Hamilton.

I watched our dog make friends with a bear (okay, it was a dog, but it was hard to tell) named Gus, and I watched my husband make our dog a drinking bowl out of a Frisbee.

I lay on my back and read my book. I lay on my back and watched hawks make wide circles in blue sky. I lay on my stomach and sang harmonies to Bill’s playlist and realized that I actually can read something as gorgeous and complex as Wolf Hall while enjoying Mood Robot. 

I closed my eyes and felt the sun soak through my clothes. I listened to the sounds of my grown and near-grown children play soccer with their friends. I watched their young, strong, powerful bodies run across the field. And later I discussed some of the merits of Wolf Hall with Nathan and Katherine, who asked me to read them a sample. Which, of course, I did.

***

The field at the bottom of our neighborhood is where my children learned to play soccer. It’s where baby Everett gave little William an eye-scratch and where Emma got a soccer trophy (I remember how badly she wanted one).

But today, if you were to come down to the field with me, I would show you where our grown-up children played and where I played with them, where the soccer goals were and where Will did his handstands.

Where our blankets lay and I used my purse as a pillow and read a book or didn’t on a February afternoon.

It was right there. I remember.

The post Field Day appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

He is before all things

You can’t know–when waking at the gray cat’s paw to a dark sky–how the light will come through the trees at noon.

Other things come first: the sliced turkey laid just so on the bread, carrots and cherry tomatoes, the mandarin, the note on the napkin.

Coffee.

He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together.

The very bad traffic at the light.

In the car-line, Emma’s friend waved at me while I stared blindly out my sunglasses. Then he pulled his hoodie over his flume of hair and kept walking.

Meanwhile, news was of bombings in Aleppo and the child mortality rate in North Carolina, of strategies toward peace in Syria and the horrors of opioid addiction. Of forest fires in the South and a new presidency.

Of four-year-old Susie in the UK who called the emergency hotline and saved her mother’s life.

In Him all things hold together.

But last night you played board games and ate brownies and enjoyed the first fireplace fire of the season, and today you sipped coffee and talked with a new friend about books and guilt and the portrayal of guilt in books

and you realize a thing you are just beginning to know, which is that guilt is like grief, that guilt is, in fact, a kind of grief. And as grief, it won’t go away. It can be denied or pretended against. It can be shoved into a corner or hidden neatly with compassion and the magnanimous gesture

but It Will Out.

He is before all things

And you say to your new friend what you know is true: that there are no easy answers. That even though you believe absolutely in an Answer, that answer isn’t easy.

If it were easy, it couldn’t possibly be the answer.

But in Him all things hold together.

It’s on the way home that you see how the yellow leaves filter the sun like lace inflamed; how the scattering of leaves pointed like pins rolls like a flume in the wake of an SUV; how air and light and color are caught and impossibly suspended together around you; how the loosened maple leaf, drawn down by its stem, inscribes circles on the air.

For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross. 

Colossians 1: 19-20

(Amendment made with gratitude to Lynne, who understands so well.)

The post All Things Hold Together appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

The conversation en route was cheerful. Chatter about driver’s ed, gladness that it was already Thursday, and the painted parking spots in the senior lot. Would they vie for a spot when they are seniors, and Katherine’s someday first car being a motor home. They did not talk about classmates, about other students, although the conversation sometimes goes this way. Because what is high school–around coursework and extracurricular everything– but a time in close proximity to people who are and are not like you, the joys and challenges this brings?

The girls’ school sits in a beautiful block of our city, one whose approach is filled with small and charming houses, sidewalks, tall trees. The school itself is a sprawling, seven-building affair, lined with trees but leaving little room for lawn, except in front of the middle school. On Thursday morning, I saw and heard something I’d never noticed before: that lawn filled with students literally at play.

I was, of course, driving. The car-line and commuter traffic is considerable here. I couldn’t pay close attention to these middle-schoolers on the lawn. But Katherine explained that this was a privilege granted to students who maintained grades to a certain standard, and by evidence of their apparent enjoyment, this seemed a worthwhile reward.

I tried to watch them–impossible–as I drove past. What they were busy at, if everyone was included. Who was engaged, how they were playing. And if anyone–isn’t there always someone who does?–stood or sat alone.

If I look for the source of this impulse, probable causes assert themselves one after the other. When I taught school–so recently, so long ago–I made it my business to like every one of my students. Because we learn better, don’t we?, from the people who earnestly like us for who we are. When I think of my own children at school–long ago or now–and the pain I feel at their potential isolation. When I think of seventh grade and how I hoped to have someone to sit with at lunch. Or when I hear (rare, once?) the story from my father, brilliant but not athletic as a child, who stood against the brick wall of his school during gym class, enduring.

I tried to get a clear look at the middle schoolers, but they moved like leaves blown over the lawn, and I didn’t know any of them.

Thursday morning was beautiful. The morning light slanted in its warm way through the buildings and the trees. I pulled up to the drop-off point, and like a fool I said to the girls as they got out of the car that every one of them is precious. All the students in the school are precious, I said, even the one who makes you cry in math. Because on the second day of school this year a boy in someone’s math class made her cry. We are not naming names.

The girls are not sure they agree with me when it comes to who is precious and who isn’t, and they said so as they hurried out of the car, pulling their backpacks behind them, slamming the doors.

I proceeded, slowly, through the line.

It was September. It is still September, and it’s not fall yet, not quite autumn if you’re going by the calendar that marks the solstice and equinox. When I was teaching and the school calendar all too soon eclipsed what was left of summer, I insisted on the equinox, if only to myself, and that fall didn’t arrive until September 21st.

It goes too fast: this life, these days. Unless you are in high school. Or middle school, which may be worse.

It was still summer on that warm Thursday morning, as I proceeded in the burnished morning light through the car lines. The trees were still green: the decorative pear by the high school’s front entrance, the crepe myrtle in bloom.

Then I drove under the live oaks. A wind gusted, and leaves like amber blades spun down and cut the air. Emma and Katherine were out of the car; they had gone their separate ways, but for a few moments still in the car line, I was driving next to Emma and watching her in my way. She did not look at me, already focused on the day ahead, already at school. But I watched her as I slowly pulled past, saw her beautiful blonde hair and watched as she was enveloped into the school.

The post Morning Drop-Off appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

After three days worth of radio news, I was nonetheless surprised to see the flag stand at half-mast at my son’s track meet. And then I remembered. And then I was surprised I had forgotten already.

But I was distracted, you see, by slicing and bagging the oranges and hauling the cooler up from the basement and buying the ice. Distracted by making sure I’d arrived to the school on time and by getting my car-load of boys, by taking them in traffic to the track meet, to a place I’d never been before.

Then I was surprised, afterward, to remember that the oranges had been meant to stay at school for the girls’ soccer game– where, instead, they had no refreshments that day.

And I was surprised, again, by making the kind of mistake I make over and over again.

I shouldn’t be surprised.

Still, I am. As I am surprised by conversation characterized by uncharitableness: over gun-control, over abortion, over voter identification. Over sports teams. Over the Greeks and the Germans and their spending habits.

And I am surprised by my children’s seeming unwillingness to make their beds (so simple!) and put their clothes away, to speak a kind word (sometimes) when Look! this unkind one– but infinitely funnier– will do.

But there is also this in me: selfishness and a deep seam of useless competitiveness that erupts in jealousies and criticism, that wants– at all costs– to be better than you. And if I cannot be better, then it will suffice to seem so.

Always, I am surprised by it.

This week I am surprised by the persistence of the pollen, crusted now in the window sills and trim, yellowing the panels of my otherwise black front door. Is it always like this, I wonder? After eighteen years of living here, must I still be surprised at the dust of these (how long?) two weeks, where a walk in open air makes your skin and clothes feel gritty?

It’s almost enough to distract me. It’s nearly enough, because its yellowness so very nearly verges on the green– the green that was born quietly chartreuse over the weekend, adding new and profound dimension to the line of our backyard and the sides of the highway and everything in-between.

So many leaves.

I might have missed it yesterday, slicing oranges as I was at the kitchen counter, in a hurry. My back was to it. But the sunlight poured into the breakfast room and so I managed to see it anyway:  the outdoor green that has deepened now to match the granny smith apples in their blue bowl on the kitchen table.

Strange how quiet grace can be, how easy it is to overlook. It’s a hand, simply and always extended, and ever so deeply scarred.

Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is Your faithfulness.  Lamentations 3:22-23

The post Surprise and Revelation appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

Then the eyes, opening to the shrouded window. Fog again. Branches, dun and depthless, converge; birch and crab apple and the nameless wonder at the top of the driveway all stolid and indistinct. Trees are always patient, wrapped today in warm gauze and, just here and there, bearing beads of lifeless dew.

Here is your winter.

No one would agree, but I would have it white again, grey-skyed or blue. I would have it all tamped down with cold, the scrape of ice and cars warming their powdered hum in the driveway. I would have sleds and red cheeks and a second reason for tea, a world sealed with snow limning everything, making the world distinct. I would have how snow makes living more acute and the cold air filling your lungs.

But outside is fog, is birdsong, is warm enough that I slept with the window open. The sun doesn’t break through, but it swells the air and fills the fog; and the dun branch, that bead of dew just there take on a subtle shine.

It’s a new mercy this morning and every morning, and it would be mercy if it were all coming down rain.

The weather, the branches, the light– everything always a metaphor.

The post Morning in Winter appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

The kitchen window still wants washing, and only yesterday I scrubbed last year’s dirt from the bathtub. The boys still annoy each other with the command to, “Chill,” and so we had it out (again) in the car this morning. And it was still cold outside from the winter that began last year.

Here in 2013, I am still not finished reading The Lemon Tree or Doctor Faustus. The current draft of my novel is still not done. And my mind, when left to its own devices, perseverates still on tired things: decisions made last spring; comments delivered in last year’s September; relationships as old as old.

And we still have no snow, while it feels for all the world that all the rest of the world does.

But this morning the water in the bird bath was all gone (again) to ice, and the field and its wire fence near the school were glistening with it. And also the bare trees, holding their arms still to cradle it. And the split-rail fence along the driveway. And the leaves of the Russian sage– all of them limned with frost so that, even hurrying into the house (from the cold), I could make out every vein.

being to timelessness as it’s to time,
love did no more begin than love will end;
where nothing is to breathe to stroll to swim
love is the air the ocean and the land

(do lovers suffer?all divinities
proudly descending put on deathful flesh:
are lovers glad?only their smallest joy’s
a universe emerging from a wish)

love is the voice under all silences,
the hope which has no opposite in fear;
the strength so strong mere force is feebleness:
the truth more first than sun more last than star

-do lovers love?why then to heaven with hell.
Whatever sages say and fools, all’s well

-e.e. cummings

The post being to timelessness: new year appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

in the longing for winter—this winter now just past, this winter that wasn’t. Thirty degrees today and sixty tomorrow: I had wished for just one solid week of winter. I worked my favorite puzzle on the coffee table again, the one with the picture covered in snow, the one that feeds my longing for grey skies and the need to wear coats against the cold and the audible silence of a snowfall.

in the weight of the school year—and the interminable demands for lesson plans at the ready and papers graded, in the faces of students who need me. We lost ourselves in Oedipus Rex and lined note-cards, in research and the citing of sources, the dangers of plagiarism. The weekdays are relentless in their fullness; and in January, morning comes in the dark—a practice that defies all kindness.

in travel to Shanghai—a twelve-hour time change, coming and going. My mother says it costs you 24-hours for every time zone you cross, but I didn’t do the math. Who knows how long it takes to recover from such monumental shifts? The clock arbitrates our days, but what if we refuse to submit to it? We left Shanghai at six p.m. on Sunday and arrived three hours earlier—three p.m, on Sunday—in Chicago. When in the world were we?

in a new kitchen—and oh, I am so grateful. The cabinets are clean, the storage ample. I can’t believe it’s mine. But there again are the days of dishevelment, the appliances and pantry stashed in boxes on the living room floor. We picked our way through them to find the cereal; I earned a serious bruise from accidental interaction with the rice cooker. To say the process has been unsettling would be nothing short of true, the gratitude notwithstanding.

But none of this made me forget. It was something else entirely.

It was that day at the end of January, that Saturday so like any other, when the news came through the phone line that my student had been killed. A freak accident. Who would have thought? In the sliver of a second, he was pulled from this life to the next and all of the rest of us are still standing at the void, peering into the open space that he had filled: at school, an empty desk, an idle locker; at home, an empty bed, a mother’s aching arms.

I lack the language for such appalling loss. I had only just begun to know him. We all needed more time. He was such a beautiful boy.

God lost His Son, too.

I was home on Good Friday, a day off from school, a day to grade papers, to navigate the new kitchen, to negotiate again with God this recent rending. And at the kitchen window, I saw them: the newborn leaves on the maple tree, carried along by the wind. Pulled by invisible agency along with all the other newborn leaves around them, all the other trees who had waited out the winter, who had sustained the months of deadness for this—this glorious movement, unmetered. I had forgotten until Friday how leaves in the wind can look so much like plants underwater. I had forgotten

how beautiful it is.

Not too many days after Blake died, Rachel left a gift in my mailbox. It was a little something lovely, something nice for me to wear. It was to remind me, she said, that there remains some beauty in the world.

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and soul’s delivery.
Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell;
And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well
And better than thy stroke; why swell’st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die. -John Donne, 1572-1631

The post Reminded appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

It couldn’t be helped this morning. U2 was playing on the iPod– their own thrilling version of the Mission Impossible theme. Outside it was a beautiful morning with the new leaves coming on everywhere: both sides of the road were layers and layers of different shades of green. I was in the car with my very own children and the sun was coming through the clouds and we only have six weeks of school left.

Of course I was dancing.

Will was dancing, too. Next to me, riding shotgun. We were dancing together to U2’s version of Mission Impossible. We were being dramatic. We were being demonstrative. We were having a Wonderful Time.

But Everett wouldn’t have it– or didn’t want to. “Stop that,” came his voice over my right shoulder. “Mom, cut it out.”

For why, I wanted to know? Who could possibly care? It was a beautiful morning. The leaves are coming. Summer is on its way.

“Mom. Stop.”

But U2–

“Stop.”

And really, he was right, right? I mean, the Last Thing we want is to embarrass ourselves in front of all the people we’ve never seen and do not know who happen to be heading West on the I-40.

I tried to stop dancing. I did. In fact, I’m pretty sure I stopped. There is Something Important, I think, in protecting– at least somewhat, anyway– the potential chagrin of a sixth grader.

And then came my first period class, and with it a true story from Jack, a senior, who does some volunteer work for the Durham Police Department.

Jack entertained us all this morning with the story of what came in over his radio yesterday afternoon as he was headed to the police station. He isn’t a police officer (obviously), but he somehow has a police radio, and so yesterday he heard the call about an exit ramp off I-85 that was all backed up. It seemed a car was stopped there on the exit ramp in the middle of the rain storm.

I remember that rain storm. It was brief and surprising. The few large and dark clouds that were traced all in sunlight decided to let loose on us all of a sudden, and for a very few minutes, Durham was lost in a rain shower, one that had my wipers going full-tilt, one that sent water splashing, one that reminded us of a summer thunderstorm.

It was Most Welcome.

And I was not alone, apparently, in welcoming it. For it seems that the driver who had stopped her car on the exit ramp off of I-85 yesterday afternoon did so because of the rain. Yes, she did. The drivers who were waiting, who were stopping up traffic on a major interstate, were doing so because this woman had stopped her car, had parked her car, had climbed out of her car, and was dancing in the rain on the exit ramp.

This was what the police call was about– the one that Jack told us about in first period today. And Jack told us that the officers were falling over themselves (figuratively, I mean) responding to the call, each of them wanting to be the first to get there, to politely stop the dancer and ask her to move along and– I am sure of it– to just get a glimpse of her dancing.

What’s a heart for, anyway?

And now I have a new ambition. Yes, I do. I’ll just have to wait awhile to accomplish it– until the next exit ramp, until the next rain shower, and until my children are just a little bit older.

What could touch me now? For what were the people on Penn Avenue to me, or what was I to myself, really, but a witness to any boldness I could muster, or any cowardice if it came to that, any giving up on heaven for the sake of dignity on earth? I had not seen a great deal accomplished in the name of dignity, ever.

(quotes borrowed with gratitude from Annie Dillard’s brilliantly wonderful An American Childhood. Thank you, Annie.)

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